What is a Fractional AI Director?

Board-level AI leadership, without the full-time headcount. I work with your leadership team on strategy, governance, and implementation — the full scope of a Chief AI Officer — on a retained part-time basis. The difference from a consultancy is accountability. I stay responsible for what gets built, not just until the strategy document is finished. For most UK SMEs and councils, that costs 70–85% less than a permanent Chief AI Officer appointment.

How much does a Fractional AI Director cost?

Retainers start at £3,500 per month — two to four hours of strategic advisory work — and go up to £8,500 per month for a full fractional engagement where I'm in your organisation 16 to 20 hours a month. Standalone project work is £1,750 per day with a two-day minimum, fixed scope and fixed fee. Every retainer is monthly rolling with a 30-day exit clause. There is no lock-in.

What ROI can I expect from AI implementation?

That depends on your starting point, which is why every engagement begins with an audit rather than a promise. The Midlands council engagement delivered £780,000 in combined savings and recovered funding. Ninety days into a manufacturing SME engagement, operating costs were down 43%. The regional law firm freed 40% of senior fee-earner time and found £2.1M in new revenue through documents they already had. In each case the bottleneck was not the AI — it was data quality and governance problems that had been sitting there for years.

Do you work with local councils and government organisations?

Yes, and public sector work is a significant part of the portfolio. The Midlands council case study is the most detailed example: £300,000 saved, £480,000 in additional funding identified, zero GDPR incidents. Council engagements are built to be procurement-compliant from day one. That means data protection impact assessments, PSED alignment, and FOI considerations are dealt with as part of delivery — not bolted on at sign-off.

What makes AI-Si.com different from Big 4 consultancies?

The main difference is what happens after the strategy is written. Big 4 engagements typically conclude at that point, with junior consultants handling delivery. I stay through implementation personally — building working prototypes in your meetings rather than after them, managing the vendor relationship, and reporting outcomes to the board directly. Big 4 rates for that level of involvement start at £2,000 per day per consultant. My full fractional engagement starts at £8,500 per month.

How do you ensure AI implementations are secure and compliant?

Every engagement starts with a data quality and governance audit before any AI tool is selected or deployed. That is not a compliance formality — it is where most implementations fail. Prompt injection testing and data minimisation are built into delivery from week one, not treated as a sign-off exercise. Simon Steggles has held data protection responsibility at board level. ISO 42001 alignment and vendor contract review for data training rights are included in every governance engagement.

Can you help identify new funding opportunities through AI?

Yes. The Midlands council case study is the clearest example: £480,000 in additional grant funding the council was entitled to but had not been claiming, identified through AI-assisted analysis of the funding landscape. A West Midlands charity secured £220,000 in additional funding through the same approach. It works because AI can map a funding landscape in hours that would take a human analyst weeks — but only when the underlying data is in good enough shape to work with.

Do you provide staff AI training?

Yes. The training is built around your actual workflows, not a generic AI literacy curriculum. Executives get a different session to operational teams — and I run a structured AI champion programme for the people who'll carry this forward inside the organisation. We cover prompt engineering, what your staff can and can't share with AI tools under UK GDPR, and how to identify and report problems. Staff are already using AI whether a policy exists or not. The training means that use is documented and under control.

Proof of ConceptProcurement

One Person. No Team. A £96,000 Government Tender. Here Is What Happened.

1 March 2026Last reviewed 1 July 20264 min readBy Simon Steggles· Fractional AI Director Birmingham, UK

Who this is for:SME owners, sole operators, and business leaders who have considered government tendering but assumed it was beyond their capacity.

TL;DR

AI-Si.com submitted a formal £96,000 government tender using AI tools alone. One person. No team. No agency. Scored 70 out of 100. Equal on methodology with the winning university bid. Better on price.

70%

Formal tender score. Second place.

30/40

Methodology. Equal with the winning university bid.

20/20

Cost score: Excellent. The winning university scored Good (15/20).

Key takeaways

AI managed a complete £96,000 procurement cycle from identification to submission, including research, writing, formatting, and filing.
The formal score was 70 out of 100. Methodology matched the winning university bid at 30 out of 40. Cost was better: 20 out of 20 versus 15 out of 20.
The only gap was documented personnel experience: 20 out of 40 versus 40 out of 40 for the winning university.
The ceiling in AI-assisted procurement is the evidence of human experience you bring, not the technology.
Any organisation that has dismissed government tendering as too complex should ask whether the barrier is real or simply unaddressed.

In March 2026, AI-Si.com submitted a formal tender response to a UK financial regulatory body. The contract was worth £96,000 and covered specialist research into AI adoption within a regulated professional sector.

One person researched, wrote, and filed the entire submission. No support staff. No tender writing agency. The result was a formal score of 70 out of 100.

The Context

One person researched, wrote, and filed the entire submission. No support staff. No tender writing agency. No overnight cramming.

The Barrier

Simon Steggles is neurodivergent. Tender documents are among the most cognitively demanding documents in business. Dense specification language. Strict formatting requirements. Multiple evaluation criteria. Tight deadlines.

For someone with ADD, that combination is a genuine barrier, not an inconvenience.

The question: could AI remove it entirely?

The Method

Simon built TenderWatch: a custom tool that scans UK and international government procurement portals and surfaces relevant opportunities automatically. No manual searching. No deadlines buried in a portal.

When this tender was identified, a second AI tool accessed the full specification, mapped a compliant response to every evaluation criterion, and submitted it.

Simon did not read the final document before it went in.

That was deliberate. The submission was an end-to-end proof of concept. Could AI manage the complete procurement cycle without human intervention at the point of submission?

The regulatory body received the bid, assessed it, and scored it formally.

The Result

AI-Si.com scored 70.00%. The winner, a leading UK university, scored 85.00%.

On methodology, both bids scored equal: Good, 30 out of 40. AI-Si.com won on cost: Excellent, 20 out of 20. The university scored Good, 15 out of 20.

The bid was lost on demonstrated personnel experience. The university scored Excellent, 40 out of 40. AI-Si.com scored Fair, 20 out of 40. One person competing against an academic institution with decades of sector credibility and a named research team behind every page.

The methodology was competitive. The price was better. The only gap was experience on paper.

Scoring Breakdown

Criterion	AI-Si.com	Winner (UK University)
Methodology	Good, 30/40	Good, 30/40
Cost	Excellent, 20/20	Good, 15/20
Personnel Experience	Fair, 20/40	Excellent, 40/40
Total	70/100	85/100

What This Proves

AI removed every barrier that would normally prevent a sole operator from competing at this level. Tender compliance. Research. Writing. Formatting. Submission. All handled.

The ceiling in AI-assisted procurement is not the technology. It is the documented evidence of human experience you bring to it.

That is a solvable problem. AI-Si.com is solving it.

Any organisation that has looked at a government tender and walked away because it felt too complex, too time-consuming, or too far outside their normal operation should ask one question: is the barrier real, or is it simply unaddressed?

Interested in This Approach?

If this kind of creative thinking, blended with a deep practical understanding of AI, is of interest to you: get in touch.

Book a free 30-minute call.

About the author

Simon Steggles - Fractional AI Director

Simon helps UK SMEs and councils put AI to work safely. Royal Navy 1984–90 (Cat 3 PV at the time, now superseded by DV); current NPPV3 Police vetting for public-sector work; ISACA AI Governance certified. Based in Birmingham. £300K+ recovered for councils, 43% cost reduction in manufacturing, zero data-protection incidents across every engagement.

More about Simon

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